Jul 16, 2008

I learned of this via Hackosis tonight, and I thought it was pretty cool. It is from the Creators of CCleaner, which I really like because it does a fairly good job of cleaning the registry, as well as other junk that tends to accumulate on your Windows PC.

I have written about defrag tools in the past. One of them, which is hard to find the free version now is called Dirms. I personally liked Dirms because it was easily scriptable. Another one I mentioned was JKDefrag, which has a pretty neat screen saver defrag thingy going on.

For those of you that don't know what defragging is, or why it is important, I grabbed this from Wikipedia:

defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

This defrag tool from the CCleaner peeps is called Defraggler. It is really light weight, and can be run from a USB thumb drive (Did somebody say portability?) Also, it comes with a command line version for...you guessed it...SCRIPTABILITY!

If you browse to the Defraggler programs file directory from the command line you will find an executable called df.exe. If you run df.exe /? a whole list of options appears before you. For instance, the simplest command to defrag your C: drive would be:

df.exe c:

Another cool thing about Defraggler, that Dirms and (Correct me if I am wrong) JKDefrag don't offer is the ability to defrag a single file.

Here is a screen shot of Defraggler in action from the Defraggler website:

One screenshot they didn't have on the Defraggler website (Probably because it lacks pretty colors) was Defraggler running from the command line, so I took the liberty of taking that screen shot for them:

All in all, I am pretty happy with this defrag utility, and I think I might even move on from Dirms because of the scripting capabilities of Defraggler. Why don't you try it out, and let me know how you like it, or if you prefer something else.